ir estates. No workman had a conscience these days, they
said. The women, too, talked of the rowdy character of the town "across
the tracks," and the unsafety of the roads for women. Adelle did not
think much about the matter, accepting it as a necessity, like gnats or
drought or flood.

The Italians at least stuck to their jobs and were good-natured. Adelle
always said "bon giorno" when she ran across them toiling up the
slippery paths with their loads of stone or cement. She liked the way in
which they showed their teeth and touched their hats politely to "la
signora." They had a feeling for her as the mistress of the house, a
latent sense of feudal loyalty to their employer that had quite
disappeared among the other workmen. Apart from the Italians, the faces
of the men upon the job were not familiar to her and were constantly
changing, a strange one appearing almost every day. So Adelle felt less
at home with them and rarely spoke to them unless she had an order to
give that she could not easily transmit through the foreman.

One morning in early March--it was while the Seaboard trouble was
acute--Adelle made her customary rounds of the place to see what was
being done. She descended to the canon and stopped for some time where
the stone masons were laying up the wall that was to support the
terraces. It was a continuation of the massive wall that rose sheer from
the bottom of the little canon to the front of the house, nearly a
hundred feet in all perpendicularly from the bottom course to the first
floor of the house. (It was the decision to thrust the house out over
the canon that had necessitated the building of this massive wall and
had delayed matters for months.) Adelle had heard Archie grumble about
the useless expense caused by this great wall, but she liked it. Its
sheer height and strength gave her a pleasant sensation of
accomplishment and endurance. She liked to stare up at it as she liked
to see great trees or massive mountains or tall buildings. It was a
symbol of something humanly important which supplied a secret craving in
her soul.

So this morning she stood silently watching the masons at their slow
work. One of the men she recognized as having been steadily on the job
ever since her arrival at Highcourt. He was a youngish, slender man with
sandy hair and blue eyes, and had the unmistakable air of being a
native-born American. His sinewy hands were roughened by his work, and
his face was almost